“Okay,” she says slowly. “I’ll think about it,” and she hangs up the phone, holding it in her hand and staring at it as if some message will appear on its darkened surface like a Magic 8-Ball. She and her sister used to consult the Magic 8-Ball religiously when they were younger: There was a phase, somewhere around age 13, when they genuinely believed it told you true things. This was the era of sleepovers and Ouija boards and middle school mixers where all of the girls stood in a knot on the polished floor of the gym and the boys threw cheese puffs at each other by the folding tables that held the sodas.
She can see it so clearly: the illuminated words on the little blue triangle—her heart in her throat, anxiously awaiting an answer—as its beveled edges bumped gently against the glass before settling flat on one side to read a message. It is decidedly so was her favorite: assuredly adult and sturdy. Reply hazy, ask again later was the worst, and they’d vigorously shake the ball again, begging for it to return another answer to “Will Alex Samuels be at the football game?” (her sister) and “Will mom ever get us a dog?” (her).
If she still had one, she’d shake it now, staring into its depths, hoping for some kind of confirmation. The job offer is a good one, but her last grant proposal was her most successful yet: Her manager, who is notoriously difficult to please, had praised her in front of the entire office during the last all-company Monday morning status meeting and she’s fairly confident that she’ll be promoted soon.
Sun is streaming through the windows, painting the wooden floorboards with rectangles of amber- and honey-colored light. If there’s a right answer to the question in front of her, she won’t find it in the living room of her friend Elizabeth’s West Village apartment. She likely won’t find it in the bottom of a margarita glass either, but that seems like a nicer place to look.
Outside, the cobblestone streets beckon invitingly in all directions. From the west, the Hudson River glints in the distance. To the east, leafy treetops indicate a tiny triangle of a park: Elizabeth had pointed it out yesterday as the best place to sit with coffee and people-watch. She’d rushed out of the apartment that morning to catch the subway to her office in Tribeca, where she worked as an underpaid and overqualified assistant to a semi-famous architect. It pained her to watch Elizabeth come home, slumped with exhaustion, at the end of the day—full of stories about fetching lunch from Sant Ambroeus (the beluga lentil salad, basil dressing on the side, no feta; beef carpaccio with extra Dijon; doppio espresso extra hot) and dry cleaning (do not return without triple-checking that the stain on the front of the chartreuse Alexander McQueen blouse is gone) and the architect’s standard poodle from the groomer’s (while holding the aforementioned lunch and dry cleaning).
Elizabeth is brilliant and funny and wildly creative. Her senior thesis had been mentioned in the New York Times for god’s sake, and won her the top award in Harvard’s architecture program—an honor so prestigious that it came with a $100,000 fellowship and had only ever been previously bestowed upon graduate students. Watching her obediently “pay her dues” as the semi-famous architect liked to remind her again and again whenever Elizabeth was passed over for any real design work was infuriating.
It was Elizabeth’s talent and current career conundrum that had her thinking more critically about the decision that lay before her. The interview yesterday had gone beautifully: better than she could have hoped. But now that the offer sat in front of her, glittering like an unwrapped present, she wasn’t entirely sure that she wanted it.
A bike whizzed past her as she stood on the street corner thinking about it all, so closely that she jumped back when the cyclist rang a bell and shouted out at her. Pulled back to the present, she looked in both directions, trying to decide where to go. Elizabeth had drawn her a map, which she found adorably quaint and so very Elizabeth, given that she could look up directions in an instant on her phone.
Two blocks away Elizabeth had starred a tiny shop selling chocolate and sea salt (they sold jars of the spicy chili crisp that both girls liked to spoon over their scrambled eggs—a habit they picked up from their friend Elisa who grew up in Shanghai). Also on her map was a perfume store (she was coveting the scent that Elizabeth had started wearing: a musky-sweet fragrance that came in a rounded bottle with a black and white label that read Santal 33 in a vintage typeface), a cupcake shop (famous for its cameo in Sex & the City), and a basement spa that gave what Elizabeth promised were foot massages worth her entire handbag collection (this was a bold statement considering that Elizabeth is the only person she knows who owns a real Birkin bag: a hand-me-down from her Parisian mother).
Her phone buzzes warmly against her leg and she pulls it from her pocket. Two messages: one from Elizabeth, and one from him. The first: “I’m sorry! I can’t make dinner. She’s making me go to Brooklyn to look for dried hibiscus flowers for a craft cocktail for her party tomorrow. How is this my life #imbasicallyawaiter” and the second, “How’d it go?”
Relief washes over her, followed immediately by a hot flush of guilt. Elizabeth is sitting in her office somewhere, dismayed at having had to abandon their dinner plans (tuna rolls at Blue Ribbon Sushi followed by the salted caramel pretzel sundae at Morgenstern’s)—not knowing the implications of her absence. And here she stands, her heart shimmering at the possibility of being with him.
She calls Elizabeth, who picks up sounding harried. Assuring her that cancelling dinner is no problem, she promises to see her later that night, since she’s leaving the next morning on an early bus back to Boston. Feeling lousy that her night will be perfection, one hundred times over, while Elizabeth’s will be total misery, she decides to pick up a slice of Elizabeth’s all-time favorite dessert to share on the couch together when Elizabeth finally staggers home around midnight.
Elizabeth has a near-religious devotion to this cake—a thick wedge, almost Roald Dahl-like in size, that her family serves at every important occasion (the front of the white eyelet dress in Elizabeth’s high school graduation photos features a telltale chocolate smudge). The cake has two delicate chocolate layers that boast the sort of tender crumb you’d find in a grocery store sheet cake. The layers sandwich a full inch of chocolate frosting so dense it’s practically fudge, and the entire affair is topped off with a drizzle of thin chocolate glaze that tastes exactly like Hershey’s chocolate syrup. Elizabeth’s parents would drive all the way from Montclair to Manhattan to pick it up, so she knows exactly where to walk to pick it up.
With that sorted, she responds to him, “Good. Great? I think? They offered me the job.” She hesitates and then types out, “Dinner tonight? Elizabeth is busy.” He sends back the words, “My heart. Cafe Cluny, 7 PM.”
How does she feel? She feels like her entire body went from black and white to technicolor in an instant. It happens that he’s spending the day in Connecticut golfing with his dad and two of his dad’s friends, and he’d asked if he could see her in the city that night, but she’d said she couldn’t abandon Elizabeth. And now here they are.
By early evening, a line has formed outside of the restaurant, which occupies a crooked corner between two crooked streets. Tucked inside are dozens of two-tops: small wooden tables of the sort she imagines you’d find in Parisian bistros. A long bar curves in an exaggerated L-shape at the back of the room, where a small step leads up to another, smaller dining room. When she’s eaten here alone—as she likes to on weekday mornings when she visits for work—she always asks to sit back there against the plate glass window, or in the tufted banquette that lines the back wall.
But tonight, they’re in the main room which is buzzing with activity: music playing softly, the clink of glassware at the bar, the distinctive restaurant soundtrack of low chatter and laughter.
The waiters wear striped Breton tops and linen aprons. One leans close to them to deposit two plates on the next table: sweet corn ravioli swimming in cream sauce with a few shaved truffles placed jauntily on top, and the tuna burger on a brioche bun topped with a swipe of wasabi mayonnaise.
He winks at her because they had once had a heated debate while on a sunset hike about what constitutes a burger and she had drawn the line firmly at seafood. “It’s just a sphere of food then!” she said, exasperated, and then he’d kissed her just below her throat and she’d lost the thread of her argument.
Turning towards them, the waiter pulls out a small pad and pencil to take their order. Somehow, she must have formed a coherent sentence, but he had just begun tracing small, slow circles on the surface of her hand with one calloused thumb and when the waiter walks away, she isn’t sure if she asked for the frisée salad and the grilled branzino or salmon tartare and the salmon with roasted Cipollini onions.
Weeks later, if pressed, she might be able to remember the meal. But it fades into the background, pushed aside by the pleasant tingling brought on by the cocktails (tall glasses of tequila, pear, and St-Germain that fizzed merrily each time they took a sip) and the way he looks sideways and down when he laughs, hard, at something she says.
Even the most memorable meal in the world—the coffee and doughnuts at The French Laundry, the duck feast at Noma, the omakase at Sukiyabashi Jiro—wouldn’t have stolen the spotlight. It was, as always, just him. By some strange alchemy, every time she’s near him the rest of the world goes soft and blurry, like they’re inside a snow globe and the outside is there but indistinct: a stage backdrop, a background soundtrack, a pencil sketch. (She can hear her high school physics teacher Mr. Brock saying animal magnetism in his nasally voice, making all the girls giggle.)
She thinks back to the few times in her life thus far when she thought her heart was at stake: rejections, breakups, fights. Her high school boyfriend broke up with her during exam week freshman year in college: She’d been buried at a lamp-lit table in the depths of the limestone library, cramming for her politics final (a brutal slog through the intricacies of constitutional interpretation taught by a notoriously hard-to-please professor) when he’d sent an email asking her to call. On her way home to her dorm—the air crystalline and cold in the January darkness—she listened to him explain about the girl he’d met. Siena, a name which conjured up flowy batik dresses and beat-up Converse sneakers and a keen interest in alt-folk music.
It was sweet almost: the way his voice nearly cracked with nerves at first. This softness she felt towards him immediately evaporated—replaced by a bone-deep anguish that she’d never experienced—once he kept talking, unable to contain his enthusiasm. They were in love. She could practically hear his happiness oozing through the phone. Later, she tortured herself by looking at photos of them together: Siena smiling widely at the top of a hike, Siena slurping a littleneck at the Yarmouth Clam Festival, Siena’s legs slung over his in the hammock at his parents’ summer house in Wellfleet.
The concept of heartbreak had always seemed like histrionics to her. Being sad was being sad—you kept going. But this was different: She felt physically sick. She couldn’t eat. The food at the dining hall sat on her plate. But now she thinks, Maybe that was all a warm-up. It was my heart flexing like a muscle. It was practice to be able to withstand falling in love with someone in a way so monumental that it feels like an avalanche or a lightning strike—a direct hit, everything engulfed in heat and flames, the conflagration enough that nothing looked the same after. And yet, everything was still in the same place, moving in the same ways. It was just more colorful, more right, like the scene where she steps out from the tornado in the Wizard of Oz.
Decadent Chocolate Layer Cake
Makes one 9” x 13” cake
For the cake
250g (2 cups) all-purpose flour
297g (1 1/2 cups) granulated sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
226g (1 cup) unsalted butter
227g (1 cup) water
28g (1/3 cup) cocoa powder (not Dutch-processed)
106g (1/2 cup) brown sugar
113g (1/2 cup) buttermilk or sour cream
2 eggs
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
For the bittersweet frosting filling
170g (1 cup) bittersweet chocolate, chopped
28g (2 tablespoons) unsalted butter
37g (3 tablespoons) granulated sugar
45g (3 tablespoons) water
151g (2/3 cup) heavy cream
½ teaspoon salt
For the glaze
1/2 cup (113g) unsalted butter
6 tablespoons buttermilk
3 tablespoons cocoa powder
2 1/2 cups confectioners’ sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 cup toasted pecans, chopped very finely
For the cake: Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Line a 13” x 18” pan (half-sheet) with parchment and lightly grease the parchment.
Whisk together the flour, granulated sugar, and salt and set aside.
In a medium saucepan, combine the butter, water, and cocoa powder. Heat the mixture, whisking constantly, until smooth and fully melted. Remove from the heat and immediately stir in the brown sugar and vanilla, whisking until smooth.
Pour the wet ingredients into the dry and mix until well-combined.
Add the buttermilk (or sour cream) and eggs, and mix well.
Pour the batter into your prepared pan and bake for about 18 to 25 minutes. This seems like a wide range but ovens vary—it’s best to start checking around 18 minutes: The cake is ready when a tester inserted into the center comes out without any wet batter clinging to it.
Remove from the oven and let cool while you make the filling. If you want to make it easier to spread the filling onto the layers, I recommend briefly freezing the cake layers (slice it in half horizontally first).
For the filling: Place the chocolate and butter in a medium heatproof bowl and set aside.
Combine the sugar and water in a saucepan and heat over medium heat, stirring until the sugar is dissolved. Add the cream and salt and bring to a boil. As it soon as it comes to a boil, take it off the heat and pour it over the chocolate/butter. Let it stand for a few minutes, then whisk the mixture until completely smooth.
Let the mixture cool at room temperature until it’s still soft but spreadable and thick: It will thicken up even more when you add it to the cake, so I like to spread it onto the cake when still slightly warm so it’s easy to spread, but thick enough that it won’t run. It’ll thicken up into a fudge-like texture as the cake sits.
For the glaze: Combine the butter, buttermilk, and cocoa powder in a saucepan. Bring the mixture to a simmer over medium heat, then immediately remove from the heat and whisk in the confectioners’ sugar and vanilla.
To assemble the cake: Slice the cake in half horizontally (see note above in cake instructions about freezing after slicing). Place one half on your serving platter, then spread liberally with the filling. You may find that you have too much frosting for the filling although honestly, I don’t really believe in too much filling. But, you do you.
Place the second cake layer on top and press down gently. At this point, I like to refrigerate the cake for a bit so that the filling sets and becomes more fudge-like, but this is totally optional. Try it both ways and see what you think!
When you’re ready to serve, stir the toasted pecans into the glaze. If the glaze has hardened a bit, depending on when you made it, you can very briefly heat it up. Pour the glaze over top of the cake, allowing it to run down the edges a bit.